黑料不打烊

The work of Moritz Grimm is of a perpetually oscillating nature. Moving rapidly and often between a multitude of dipoles Grimm鈥檚 practice is at time difficult to pin down and define. There is a seemingly classical nature to his aesthetic; sculptures, paintings and drawings rendered in clay, paint and other mediums that carry within them the gravitas of art history. However, one often finds oneself secondglancing at Grimm鈥檚 work. What at first looked like a innocently figurative Degas-esque dancer in clay for example, turns out to be a stripper mid-pole dance. Similarly, what appears as a drawing from an ArtDeco era coffee advert ultimately reveals itself as a rendition of a dominatrix complete with opera-gloves, horse whip and exposed breasts. These allusions to classical forms and materials, and their use as vessels to carry more present-day imagery alluding itself to the contemporary condition, is perhaps a defining feature of Grimm鈥檚 works and practice in general. Through their combining of temporally disparate elements, these hybridizations manage to buck time, soto-speak, and converge in the realms of what might be described as 鈥榯imeless鈥�. However, unlike a musician or composer who鈥檚 fans span generations and thus who鈥檚 music retains a temporally relevant quality, the works of Moritz Grimm purposely veer rather dramatically into the onslaught of time, and face the Benjaminian wreckage head-on. Grimm鈥檚 purposeful combining of the classical and the contemporary in this manner, forces his works to operate within an anachronistic space opened up via what is essentially a cultural loophole. They did not 鈥榚arn鈥� their atemporal status as most artifacts do, but rather acquired it as a necessary side-product of their very being. The show presented here perfectly exemplifies Grimm鈥檚 tendency towards the anachronistic and its origins perhaps offer us some material with which to unpack its various elements. The exhibition鈥檚 title 鈥楨va鈥� is taken from the name of the artist鈥檚 partner鈥檚 mother who passed away before he could have met her. After moving with his partner into the mother鈥檚 old apartment, Grimm began to develop a fascination with her old belongings still stored at the apartment and began exploring them and eventually mining them as a source of inspiration. Grimm moved into a place rich in personal history, and yet had to repersonalize that space on his and is partner鈥檚 terms; a potentially daunting task when that history is so close to heart. Similarly as one produces artworks one enters into cultural space rich with history and similarly one has to figure out how to navigate that space in dialogue with and at times against its preexisting occupants.